Journalism has changed…but what has actually changed in regards to the media? It actually started long ago. And I was quite naïve about its transition.
When I was writing for a chain of local newspapers as a side job, a new Editor-in-Chief came in and asked me to increase my number of stories per week from three to five, and to be in the office for five hours per week editing, and without an increase in compensation. When I challenged him, he responded with “if you are not willing to adapt to the changing times, you will not survive.” At the time, since I didn’t NEED the job, I laughed at him and walked out. But I have to admit, he was right…I was wrong.
When I was growing up, my best friend Tom Meirose’s father was the Sales Director for WCTC radio in New Brunswick, New Jersey. He used to take Tom and me to Rutgers University football games where WCTC was doing the radio broadcasts. But I remember most was that his job was selling advertising time. He went around to the local and regional businesses and they would purchase ads. And he earned a pretty good living at it.
When I went to college and studied broadcasting at the University of Miami, I worked at a number of radio stations and there was always a team of marketing professionals and sales professionals, and then there was the on-air talent. There was a distinct division in duties and a structure that clearly existed at every radio station.
Some years later, not too long ago, I met up with a person who had started out in radio around the same time I did. He was also an on-air personality as a disc jockey playing good old-fashioned rock and roll. But when we got together, he was the news director at the local radio station. Perplexed, I asked him what he was up to. He told me that he was not only the news director, but he was the news. He was the person reading the news copy on the air. He was also the sales director. He was the person selling air time to the advertisers. And he was also the morning drive time jock.
Huh?
I thought back and remembered that about 10 years ago I was approached by a friend who asked me to do a radio talk show at a North New Jersey radio station, a station that was pretty popular when I was a kid. Initially I jumped at the chance to get back into radio and went to the station for a meeting. The GM said that they had heard me do some guest spots elsewhere and would love to have me on the air for a six-month trial. But I had to sell the air time. SELL THE AIR TIME? All on-air personalities had to sell ad time to pay for their time slot and to pay for whatever compensation they had hoped to derive from their show.
I was never a person who ever wanted to partake in sales and without giving it a second thought I IMMEDIATELY turned it down. My friend tried to reason with me saying that I was a very successful fundraiser in the nonprofit sector so that should translate into a successful sales career.
Uh…no. Fundraising for nonprofits is not even remotely close to selling advertising time. And that is not even the point. The point is that the roles in radio, in the media, had already greatly shifted. And they continue to shift even more with the advent and emergence of the internet.
EVERYONE is a journalist now
Whether or not you have your own blog site, you have your own page free of charge thanks to platforms like Facebook. Go ahead and spout whatever you want…you have an audience.
That’s the thing…everyone IS a distributor of information. It doesn’t mean it’s fact, it doesn’t mean it’s truth. But it IS a dissemination of information to the masses thanks to social media.
My frustration led me to reach out to some of my closest friends and former colleagues in the media and just get a sense of what they had to say about the changes.
Dennis Turner, long-time TV news anchorman:
Technology and fragmentation seem to be the two biggest changes in the media. When I started in the business, I was one in a team of three (sometimes four people for a live shot) covering a single story. Almost 50 years later, someone with the right training, an iPhone and a mic can turn in a product that’s nearly as good. Journalists must wear many hats and be good at all things now to be successful.
The other big change was going from three or four channels to hundreds with cable and now to millions with social media. These days you can seek out the flavor of news or entertainment that you want. Much of it is poorly produced, but people are accepting it. Those of us who still believe in the connection and quality of the legacy media have to fight every day for attention in a world where the cacophony gets louder, and the people get more indifferent to the world around them all the time.
Mark R., newspaper and cable TV broadcasting veteran:
I am actually most stressed by the loss of WCBS AM radio in New York. There is nowhere to turn for “on the spot” news. WABC has a powerful signal, but has become a very one-sided station….way too much repetition of sound bites and commentary. Local newspapers (actually their websites) rely heavily on police press releases with no actual first hand reporting. With few reporters, the same topics get covered day after day and much of the content is a copy of previous information.
Linda Corley, documentary producer:
Budgets are much smaller. Back in the day people were just writers or just producers, etc. People are now “Jacks of All Trades,” which in my opinion, keeps it hard to master one area of the field. I see in print, typos and bad grammar all the time because editors are becoming rare. I think, all in all, storytelling is getting dumbed down.
Dave LaMont, national TV sportscaster:
Things are done with only saving money in mind. One person handling shooting, reporting, and editing is quite common now. REMI (remote integration model sports broadcasting method) sports events with only the announcers and a few other on site, and the rest of the production team in a studio is becoming more common place, as is the building of studios on many college campuses to save money on the trucks.
Jeremy Lang, long-time journalist with the Washington Post:
Dear Lord…how many hours do you have? I’ll give you one example, because it’s the latest way things changed at The Washington Pos. No prize for guessing: AI. Everyone’s busy. So five years ago websites started doing three bullet point summaries at the top of every story. Now it’s “AI Takeaways” and in addition to editing stories, part of my job was to edit the shit that AI generated. Hilarity ensued. The Post start using AI to generate podcasts customized to each subscriber. The launch included opinion “said” as fact, unattributed information, wrong information, facts and quotes attributed to the wrong people (including The Post itself” and even misidentification of the AI hosts themselves. The AI used LLM speech generated from the actual human podcast hosts, but inserted pauses, sighs, and “um” into the “host’s” speech, to the point that the human staff protested that “we don’t talk like that.”
Michael Weinstein, long-time radio broadcaster:
My views from the radio side are sad, slow but rapidly death of the medium. Back in the 1980’s when I sought my fame and fortune on the radio, I figured that as long as there were radios in motor vehicles it would be a vibrant career choice. I saw the writing on the wall and got out of the full-time sector in 1996. Never could I have realized what a career-saving choice that would be as I pivoted from broadcast traffic reporting to transportation management. Along the way I watch radio and other broadcast media contract while my sector has expanded.
A major cause of radio’s fall to irrelevance was the inability to evolve with technology and continue to attract younger demographics. My 30 and 27-year-old kids don’t listen to terrestrial radio, it’s all Spotify, Pandora, etc. It doesn’t even matter anymore that radios are still in cars, now you can stream music and other programming on your phone, often commercial free due to subscriptions. Following the end of the Wall Street Journal Radio Network where I worked until their sudden demise at the end of 2014 to the ultimate gut punch which was the closing of news radio legend WCBS 880 on August 25, 2024, I was there for that as well, working a shift on that last day when I officially retired from the media. I am so fortunate that the gig was a side hustle for me but so many full-time radio lifers were cast onto the streets that day. So tragic for so many.
I made sure that neither of my kids became nepo-babies and followed their old man down a path of disappointment and sudden endings. It’s not over yet but soon we will all say “RIP Radio. You had a great run.” I compare the demise to that of Kodak. They thought they were in the film business but by the time they realized they were in the memory business it was too late. They had been replaced. Same fate for radio.
Jennifer Amato, regional newspaper and magazine journalist:
True journalism has morphed into something without a real definition – there is no more fact-checking, no more unbiased reports, no more truth. The dissemination of information has become the dissemination of people’s opinions as truth. And AI is amplifying the negative effects of social media – we are being “influenced” by people who don’t have true media training, therefore diluting the industry.
So there you have it. Media professionals telling it like it is.
